biography
Chauncey Eugene 'Chick' Waltman (1896-1962)
U.S. industrial designer born near Columbus, Indiana, the son of a minister. The family moved several times to Ohio and Michigan and ended up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he began working in the decorating department of the Berkery and Guy Furniture Company. By 1912, at age 16, he started a decorating department at the Imperial Furniture Company.
After High School he took a job in Chicago with John A. Colby and studied decorating and furniture design at night school, but when World War I began in 1917, he joined the Air Force, trained in aerial photography, and became a second lieutenant. But the war was over and he returned to night school in Chicago. He soon got a job as a lamp designer for Valentine and Seaver, and later with the Art Lamp Company and the Kaplan Lamp and Shade Company.
In 1924, he made a deal with Kaplan to go to Paris to study art, while receiving his weekly salary of $150 and spending two days a week drawing lamp designs in the new Paris styles and sending them to Kaplan for manufacture. For about a year, he studied at the Grande Chamber des Arts. When he returned to Chicago in 1925, he set up his own freelance office, designing lamps and furniture. After industrial design became well known in the 1930s, his office would participate as Waltman Associates at 165 Chicago Avenue.
Walter Dorwin Teague, Jr. (1910-2004)
U. S. industrial designer born in Forest Hills Gardens, New York as the son of his famous father. He graduated in engineering from MIT in 1930, but as a student in 1929, worked with his father in the design of the Marmon 16, introduced in 1932 by the Marmon Motor car Company. In 1934 he went to work with his father, and in 1935, designed the Model 100 for the National Cash Register Company with his father.
In 1942, he joined the Research Engineering Department of the Eclipse-Pioneer Division of Bendix Aviation as a junior engineer, and worked on the Boeing B-17 bomber. He rejoined his father’s firm in 1953 as a partner, and in 1957 supervised the design of the U.S. Information Agency pavilions at the Zagreb Fair in Croatia and the Vienna Fair. Upon his father’s death in 1960, he was number two in the office of Walter Dorwin Teague Associates (WDTA), and designed the Euphorian dental chair for the Ritter Company.
He resigned from WDTA in 1967 to start his own business, Dorwin Teague, Inc., in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, specializing in industrial design and engineering, designing ski equipment, a bicycle brake, and snowmaking apparatus. He worked there until 1993.
Excerpted from “Designers of the Machine Age” by Carroll Gantz, to be published 2014 by McFarland & Company, Inc.
John Gordon Rideout (1898-1951)
U.S. industrial designer born in St. Paul, Minnesota, who entered the University of Washington as an architectural student, but World War I interrupted his study and he served in the U.S. Navy in 1917. In the 1920s, he worked as a graphic designer in Chicago, and was one of the founders of the Chicago Society of Typographic Arts.
In 1931 he relocated to join with Harold van Doren in opening an industrial design office in Toledo, Ohio, where they developed a growing business. From 1933 to 1935, they designed Art Deco products, including a plastic radio for Air King, casseroles for Wagner, scales for the Toledo Scale Company, and bicycles, tricycles, scooters and wagons for the American National Company.
In 1935, Rideout left Van Doren to open his own office, John Gordon Rideout and Staff, in Cleveland, Ohio. The reason was primarily to be near his fiancée, Alice Chalifoux, a concert harpist with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, who he married in 1937.
During World War II, Rideout closed his office in 1941, but reopened in 1943 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and in 1944 joined with architect Ernest payer to combine industrial design and architecture. In 1944 he was one of the 15 founders of the Society of Industrial Designers (SID).
Excerpted from “Designers of the Machine Age” by Carroll Gantz, to be published 2014 by McFarland & Company, Inc.